A napkin with scribbles harpooned into yesterday’s bloated corpse

by maddrunkgenius

I got very drunk and saw lots of wonderful things, and had many lovely conversations with interesting people or at least had many conversations with interesting snippets and imagery, and wrote so very many down on my napkin that I carried from bar to bar to bar to back ‘home’ as I’m calling it now, and then I lost it, and with it, everything from the night in all its stupid beauty.

It’s nothing, nothing really, but it was everything from a night that slipped away and won’t ever happen again. I won’t ever get the night again, so all youre left with is the memories & you never really remember a damn thing at all, do you? Not what your friend wore yesterday or what you ate a year ago. Not on your own hard drive, you don’t.

So you write them down, type them up, but in my case I usually scribble them out first, which helps.

And what was it, what was it?

The first place we went was too packed full of legitimate people to fit in it a gangly group of hostelling pub crawlers. So we went over to the second place, the Irish place, and there we soon all got up & walked out in the middle of a performance & it was really awfully rude. And then there was a bum outside & he begged a bunch of drunks for money, & we said we didn’t have nothing, despite just having all walked out of a fucking pub, for chrissake. (‘Have you got a debit card reader?’) But the German fellow (‘which one?’) gave him ‘all reds’ — all pennies, even the Danish pennies he had — & the fucking bum still thanked him for it, tho God knows why. They’re nice people up here, even the homeless. They haven’t got religion b/c theyve got too much love in their hearts for their fellow man up here. And it hurt my heart because I am an asshole, but he looked like a man who needed a something to drink & I tried to give him money but only if he’d promise to go inside & get him a shot. But he said he didn’t drink so I just gave him some change (still he thanked me!).

The second proper bar, where was the second proper bar? I lost the napkin! I cant remember. No, Linda’s Tavern, Linda’s Tavern, ‘the Last Bar Kurt Cobain was Seen at Alive™.’ Except some fellow, a Great Big Dane, but a person, too, said, ‘What, was he seen at some other bar after he died?’ And this was quite funny, but not well taken by the Native dragging us along. And the joke was on us because the trip was a mile walk uphill & not too terribly fun, so we got strung out along the way & really should have had a piss at the Irish place before hand, because the bushes & even Interstate bridge were already looking quite inviting to the dicks in the group, which were predominant.

But finally we got there all right, and every Predominant in the group made for the bathroom. Only around Europeans can you find a Q at the toilet. But christ, what awful farts in that one restroom, expelled from buttholes belonging to every corner of the globe as urinals & toilet bowels splashed & splinkered.

And then drinking at one large not-large-enough table, but I & the Aussies at our own table somehow, and the other Aussie (long of Vancouver), he was Doing Work on the Minnesotan broad visiting her brother, but how hot she was! And getting drunk, too, so she might very well make a bad decision. And these bars we were at now were very badly lit.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. What did they say, at Kurt Cobain’s last bar? What was funny or tragic or even mildly interesting? I dont know. Caught by the wind & ripped away, perhaps to show up in a dream sometime? Or hallucination. I dont know. Something about personal ads in the alt weekly publications.

At some point the whole group sans We Few left and let us know where they were going. And oh! Minnesota and VanAussie had been talking long, long since the Irish place & drank enough to walk out hand in hand till around others they dropped hold behind their backs so subtly except that we were still inside & saw it fully & laughed & derided as hungry dogs wanting a bone we won’t get, but pretending we don’t even want it, really.

So we stayed & they went on ahead. Ten minutes later we were at the Comet but no one else was & we asked if the pub crawl had crawled on thru but the bartender said it hadn’t been the case. We ordered anyway & sat drinking, We Few cut off from everything but the bar (#MoreImportant), because we didn’t have nobody’s numbers to ask them. But the ceiling had all sorts of dollar bills & a couple of playing cards & maybe something else, but it was so high up you couldn’t imagine how it was accomplished without aid of ladder. The bathroom had a communal sink, but no, it was a trough. And a Romney/Ryan bumper sticker in the basin. (Tee hee.)

At last we genius’d up a way to contact the rest, did so, and went Cha Cha Lounging, next to the pizza place but downstairs. And the German, the same penny German, had stepped outside to smoke but came in ahead of us, and in his inebriation, could not believe the guy checking IDs had forgot about him so quick & went on about it a bit too much till the ID Checking Guy says, ‘Well are you going to be an asshole about it?’ And the Penny German Asshole says, ‘Yeah, I am,’ and now, no, he can’t just go downstairs to see his friends; he’s got to take his blacked-out ass home in his very own the-mile-walk back (but downhill & just right down the damn road). But I get my ID checked without any lip & tell the shepherd of we many international drunk sheep, ‘The German guy is drunk & about to get kicked out, I think.’ And Our Shepherd rolls his eyes all world-traveler-weary & asks, ‘Which one?’ And I couldn’t say, ‘The penny German,’ so I just said, ‘I dont know,’ which was practically as true.

I tried to get one of my Aussie’s laid, by cockblocking the VanAussie with Minnesota, who had kept drinking. But there was already some other cockblocker there ahead of me, & that cockblocker I do believe won the night in the end for after we got back to the hostel, they went off together to I know not where except together, and very drunk.

There was a very cute, not quite drunk enough Kiwi there with nice tits & I helped one of my Fellow Abandoned/Friend Aussies move to a table where magnetism would bring pussy back ’round (purses & coats left in a booth).

Something else, something else. Saloon doors on the bathroom? Was that important? I can’t remember; it was on the napkin & stated perfect as The Real Thing, in clear whiskey vision.

I bought a drink for the Kiwi, but I wrote instead of pussy chasing, you see, and then last call came a half hour early, it seemed to me, & the plan was to go find some place still open that sold Liquor and get there before it too closed. But the grocery store on the way had only beer, and in my stupidity I didn’t get more.

We all made it back eventually, God only knows how, tho Minnesota and the Swoop-In Aussie were going along together at nearly the same pace as I (strange coincidence, that) and there was still some beer bought early in pre-game warmup to the crawl. The two of them went off elsewhere studying maps for ever so long, and the main discussion of the drunken group together was the Metric system & why it was sensible for abstract calculation, but Imperial was better for real things because it ostensibly was based on real, everyday measurable proportions & units, while the Metric system only really had base 10 going for it, and Base 10 is stupid anyway. A Frenchman & I agreed. A Chris Elliott-looking Canadian did not, or did not comprehend at this late hour, one.

Then I think it was suddenly just me & the remaining Good Aussie left; all womanfolk had scampered off realizing even in their dampened state the paucity of the quality men around (except, as noted, very possibly the Minnesotan). So the Good Aussie & I went in Search of An Open Strip Club being too foolish to realize the nearby one had been closed an hour & .5, and too stupid to find any others to check, anyhow.

Then we came back & drank another beer or two, & I wanted to write one last thing down about what had just happened, but I’d lost my napkin & black pen.

I had a night captured in mnemonic & aphorism & cryptography — squared — all snatching yesterday neatly from the jaws of forget, so much more & more succinct than this, but I lost it.

Boo hoo.

UPDATE:

And of course of course I forgot near the best part, making fun of one guy for making out with a fat chick drunk in front of everybody but tryina convince the young guitarist Aussie to try chubby chicks in the lean times.